The Scoop

Journalists are not the only ones on a permanent lookout for a scoop.

What those folks fish for usually concerns only the immediate moment. In truth, however, every writer is looking for catchy stories and catchy titles to get better reader attention - and longer is better. Writers try a few other tricks, too. For example, given the same facts, which are mostly routine and frequently depressing, a spicy title can help perk up interest like nothing else would.

So, for example, if I wanted this piece to really grab your attention - a title like "King Kong and I" would work better - much better, in place of the wimpy title you see above.

Of course, there could be some problems with an attention grabber title for THIS write-up.

First, since this piece is not about the Kong of the movie fame, it would falsely invoke images of wholesale destruction, of man’s cruelty to fellow animal, and other gory stuff. Second, that giant Gorilla would loom too large - as giant gorillas invariably do - and overshadow all else!

I mean, just imagine his oversize innocent eyes staring at you through your 50th floor condo window - beseeching, protesting, complaining and perhaps, if you were to recall the way the Kong toyed with the skimpy clothes of the actress, even flirting! Truly, the story of the Kong would be a big story to cover! And I mean BIG!

Therefore, this piece is not about that mythical beast. No Kong!

Perhaps with some effort, I could tweak the title and call it "The King and I" - to grab limelight off the famous movie from five decades ago. Only problem is, since it will fail to pit the "I" before anyone of royal lineage (although it is difficult to establish who can legitimately claim such lineage unless one somehow positions oneself at a vantage point outside the royal bedroom at the crucial moment) that would be a misnomer, too!

Hey, don’t get mad. I know you are tired of "I" playing name games with you! I will tell you.

This piece is about a writer who seems to have found the proverbial magic formula - his very own permanent scoop. It is about Mr. Stephen King, the horror writer.

No, I do not claim (deviously, as some folks always say I do) any comparisons of myself with the King (what do you think I am, nuts?! Don’t answer that!) But in a sense, I could have called it "The King and I" as long as the "I" were to refer to the generic reader looking at Mr. King and the looking, of necessity, were to take place through the "eyes" of this one individual.

I have been interested in Mr. Stephen King for what seems like forever. But why the super King?!

Well, it is rather simple. He makes too much money. And I, who comes closest to a King when grabbing a Whopper for a hurried lunch at the Burger King - well, I am jealous!

I mean, here is somebody who apparently satiates his creative urges as a writer and mints money at the same time. He is probably the envy of the world, or at minimum the envy of the world of writers for, along with those loads of money, he also manages to thumb his nose at the glittery business world which helps him make it. He even ensures a physical distance from that glittery world. (I mean, won’t you consider life as purely honky-dory if you lived in rural, picturesque Maine but had the means to spend its winters in your oceanfront mansion in Sarasota, Florida?!)

It is a bit like getting paid for making faces at your boss.

The King is doing something on a day in and day out basis which, as every struggling uninspired writer knows - and you can certainly take my word for it - is clearly impossible to do! What the King does is what only he can do - it is his thing - which leaves us, the others, speechless.

If you have read the King (and who has not) then you know the sort of speechlessness I am talking about: when words fail you but your power to express your deepest fears remains.

It remains and expresses in various other ways, expressive and polite mostly, but quite often expressive alone (which is all we would say here for the sake of being polite).

To heck with the politeness! Here is what the King does. He makes his readers pee!

Yup, that’s right - the wet stuff is a direct result of the gory stuff.

There is plenty of gore in Stephen King pieces - sufficient to release those flood-gates of fear in the bravest of American cowboys. (Of course, you need to know his settings and his lingo!) But how the heck do his stories bring out such primitive fear in the minds of the US public? (And just as important, however he does it, can I have a piece of it too?!)

As an individual, the King is rather unremarkable in most ways. His smarts at what he does so well probably had little to do with his upbringing. For sure, he did not have the best of life growing up, what with his dad deserting his mom when he was only five. And he certainly was not problem-free early on. He had a drinking problem for over a decade and was intoxicated even while delivering the eulogy at his mother’s funeral. And maybe, just maybe, his proclivity for horror had morbid roots - having witnessed a friend getting killed on train tracks. Or just as likely, it had comical origins or at least comics origins, for he avidly read Tales from the Crypt as a child.

Like in most situations, necessity is the mother of invention and being poor was perhaps the greatest motivator. He needed to write stuff that would sell. So there! Out with the creative originals - in with the mundane gore!

Out with the aspirations of great literary heights - in with the fears of the unknown that reside deep inside every one of us, waiting for only a touch of the catalyst! Except in this case, he REALLY tapped into something - he grabbed for one scoopful and tapped into an inexhaustible source: his very own permanent scoop to riches and fame!

And there was no looking back!

Like I said, as an individual he is rather unremarkable. For example, like most Americans, he loves baseball - and especially loves his team, the Boston Red Sox (the major league team closest to Maine).

But here is something that many desi writers will have a lot of difficulty understanding - the King donates considerable sums of money to charity!

I mean, how can a real, original, creative writer accumulate money - a virtual impossibility itself - and then, how can a real writer EVER accumulate money only to give it away?!

Why write, which is a lot of work for very little money (in case of certain web sites, for no money!) Especially, why write in the age of internet when every Tom, Beej, and Harry (since some consider the Beej synonymous with the Dick!) can grab that writer’s hat and claim it as his (or her) own?

Why would the likes of the King - who can make money no matter what they write (while the rest of the "I" bhai struggle on) and who have perhaps achieved everything a writer’s heart could desire - go to all that trouble and then just give it away?

Beats me - go ask the shrinks (if you can afford to ask one)! Quite idiosyncratic, won’t you say?!

On second thoughts, don’t ask the shrinks. You already know the answer.

Perhaps individuals like the King write so that they can give that money away to get a deeper level of satisfaction. The satisfaction of giving - just the right dessert to top off the satisfaction of that sumptuous meal of writing!

Ah, that satisfaction of writing, of having created what has meaning! The satisfaction of completing work with meaning as distinct from the other type of complete work, which feels like the end result of sex without gratification and which would leave one with the completed physical act and sometimes a baby - but little else! So that’s what it must be. That all-consuming crafty desire to create fear!

But hold on a minute! Then why is the King so fond of pulling little tricks on his audience?

Like Alfred Hitchcock, the King makes little appearances through nondescript characters in his movies. It is one thing for him to pop up in Pet Sematary as the minister at a funeral. But in his acting debut - in Creepshow - he even plays a backwoods redneck who grows moss all over his body.

Now, come on! Who would fall for such outlandish crap as the redneck mossy King? (Only half of my compatriots, it seems! Virtually every story he writes is a runaway success as a movie.)

Well, okay! So honesty is perhaps not always a writer’s best suit.

Any writer can be dishonest to an extent - the King admits he based the alcoholic father in The Shining on himself (and did not accept that fact for years).

Perhaps we could write off his aberrations to idiosyncrasy?

Yes, the King has his few idiosyncrasies. He owns no cell phones. He rarely signs photographs. Rumor has it that he hoards many film props from his movies and even keeps a life-sized model of Barlow the Vampire (from Salem’s Lot). Rather strange, won’t you say, especially if you were to discount Michael Jackson’s reported fascination with the dead body of the "elephant man"?

And talking of idiosyncrasies, he insists that none of the charities he supports - not the stadium he helped build, not the Aquatic Park, or the scholarships he paid for, or the whole nine yards - none of those are supposed to mention his name. Not a single one! (So, if you ever expect to find a Stephen King Chair in the Department of English of any prestigious US University - forget about it!) Quite enigmatic, that guy is!

How puzzling! And if you think about it - how humbling!

The King is high on quality, low on intransigence and he comes across as a rather humble person for somebody of his stature.

Just think about it! The King is so predictably prodigious in terms of his output. He writes left and right, he can toss out books faster than those pitching machines used by the Boston Red Sox. He can send all his thoughts, his musings, his fears, his angers, and his what-nots directly into what he writes on a given day.

If he hears an out-of-the-ordinary phrase, he will develop it as a seed and write a book on it. If his son suffers from a sneeze-attack, he will write a book on a sneeze-inducing killer virus. If his baseball team has a rough day at the ball park - he will write a book about a maniacal baseball player. He even worked into a book a likeness of the 1999 road accident which almost ended his career and could just as easily have ended his life. The King has written over sixty works of fiction, non-fiction, short fiction - and over 200 stories, very few of which are forgettable.

He is able to pull off success in spite of the mischief - while others can not - because once he picks a topic, he really researches it in great detail. He was probably the world’s only shock victim who discussed his condition with the paramedic transporting him in the ambulance because he had earlier researched the topic so well himself.

It is not like the King thinks the world revolves around his own image - as THE horror story writer. Certainly, he has made a few attempts at non-horror writing using the pseudonym Richard Bachman - perhaps expecting, if I were to guess, that it would entail more "seriousness" assigned to his work.

But once you acquire that "bad" habit - that of being mischievous - it is extremely difficult to shed it. Even writing with the other name, he could not stop himself from dropping sufficient hints so his real fans would still be able to spot him. No matter what he wrote, he had a tough time maintaining control over his "other side" struggling to get out - that split personality -just like in his horror novels!

Like a master criminal, he simply can not resist just a bit of a hint of the clue - after all, what good is the perfect "crime" if it goes totally unnoticed?!

And that is one ingredient in the writings of the King that we readers finds so enticing - no matter if the reader is young, old, man, woman, or child!

The King pushes the envelope to the limit and then some. After researching his topic well and getting his details right, he imagines the most horrible of thoughts and then interweaves those with the most mundane.

There is nothing extraordinary about most of the events that he describes in his stories. You could meet that librarian on a routine basis. That truck driver is no unusual sight on the highway. And there is nothing extraordinary about the man who is walking his dog next door.

Yet each of these routine images could suddenly turn upon you - that librarian could be devil incarnate, the truck driver could become the messenger of death, and the canine being walked could have just emerged from his graveyard a little after his times - and in violation of the known laws of nature! Just when you have dismissed something as the most trivial of the ordinary, it may suddenly jump up on you and go:

"Boo!"

And, like all real writers, the King writes because he likes to - not for the money. No surprise that having announced in 2002 that he was stopping, he has already written several more books. (We should have known, of course!) And he really means it when he says that good stories cannot be called consciously and should not be plotted out beforehand.

Sometimes it takes a while - the Dark Tower series lasted 30 years, yet at its halfway point, when a terminally ill fan requested to be told the ending, the King felt helpless because he really did not know himself. The story takes on a life and the writer becomes mere medium to uncover it in its own sweet time, not of the writer’s choosing.

And in those stories, while on surface there may appear randomness and there may even appear madness - there is always a method to the King - so at a deeper level, there is continuity. The references to the dark fearful sides of the American culture are deeply mixed - mixed so well that the fearsome fiends and the fearful fools come out as equally credible. Be it crime, be it war, be it physical harm, and be it bigotry or any of the countless daily elements that we live with - it is all present in his works - and it can not but touch!

The touch of the King - like no other touch in the world! It comes with a shiver attached.

Nobody is immune from the touch of the King! Nobody can hope to escape from the magic of his horror wand - in fact, there is no waiver even for those who wave it! The King does not even spare himself - in The Dark Half he turns upon himself with extreme vengeance.

And he can turn upon whole segments of population without the slightest hint of mercy. Just feel his contempt for readers of a popular gossip magazine "..its readers have thin nostrils, so they can not pick their own noses and must do that of others!"

The King can be ruthless to the poor "I"! But anything-but-poor is how I feel when I read him. He transports me into zones of existence that this janitor could never transport himself to. The memories of the broom, the mop, and the hallway circuit boards simply fade away as I transform into his hero of the moment - and become what he wants "me" to become most of all.

A dumb-struck dummy shivering all over - when not sweating all over!

The King makes "me" feel rich in a way only the King could. And through the magic of his words, "I" can truly identify with the most pathetic, the most fearsome, and the most delusional creatures any one could ever imagine - undergoing the most impossible encounters in the most non-existent worlds that anyone could ever conjure up.

Sure, there are a few rules of Physics, logic, and common sense which take the back seat - but the excitement of the instant - the thrill of living what could never happen in real life - makes it worth it. So, however counter to the rules of the natural world - his stuff is essentially very scary AND enjoyable!

The King often toys with the reader. He punches you in the gut by killing the most likeable of his characters without the least mercy. Often there is little logic to his plots, sometimes it may even appear the most hare-brained. In fact, he has himself taken his work apart quite mercilessly at times.

But even the hare-brained plot can still take the most hair-raising turns and twists. The value is not merely in the content, which often repeats its essence across a spectrum - but in his style. To his fans, it is not the ideal story line that matters - but the positively addictive high of the emotional thrill, the all-engrossing mist of fear which blurs one’s vision of the surrounding physical world - and takes one to a world that is unknown, even though it is right here - a place which is chockfull of excitement - a place where only fear rules.

A place that does not exist! The Utopia to beat all Utopias!

When everything is said and done, the King’s strongest suit is - and has forever been - that he can put the reader through those ringers of fear on the inside without damaging them in the least on the outside! The King is most potent when he can take away the impotency of the "I" to go out there and encounter the very real fears of what IS real!

I hope the King keeps writing forever so the "I"s of the world can continue to sing his praises just as long!

(Note: This write-up uses information on Mr. Stephen King published on the Wikipedia.)